Rand Beers and Donald Kerrick and Roger Cressey and Paul O'Neill and John Brady Kiesling and Joseph Wilson and John H. Brown and Don North and Anthony Zinni and Karen Kwiatkowski and and Ray McGovern and Ray Mcmichael all of whom who have spoken out and/or resigned because of the administration's handling of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.

It's really impressive that this many people in the world of politics and government service would take the extraordinary step of following their principles and leave their work because of it. It speaks volumes for the badness of the Bush administration, I think.


BTW, Digby's rant is "wrong-headed" because Dan Drezner's comments about Richard Clarke's personality -- which Kevin Drum quoted and agreed with -- don't appear to me to be offered (by Kevin at least -- Drezner goes farther in his remarks) in an attempt to take down Clarke or dilute the truth or power of the picture he's presented of an administration dangerously unfocused on terrorism, they're simply straight-forward observations, and I see nothing wrong with them:

Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it's clear that Clarke was adept at maximizing the available resources and authority required to do his job, given the organizational rivalries and cultures that made such a pursuit difficult. In the worst sense, Clarke was a monomaniacal martinet whose focus on his bailiwick to the exclusion of everything else is phenomenal.

Indeed, that comports well with the sense I get from watching Clarke testify, seeing him on the interview shows, and from what I've read so far of his book, that's he's the kind of guy that would probably be really annoying to work with, but who is exactly the right kind of person to do the job that needed to be done.

Supporting Clarke is important, doing so to the exclusion of seeing him, and ourselves, clearly is folly. As I wrote before, I have little doubt that many of the people now extolling Clarke's virtues would have been castigating him severely if he had gotten his way and launched rolling air and missile attacks, similar to those then underway in Iraq, against al-Qaeda and the Taliban before the 9/11 attacks occured, which was what Clarke recommended at the time of the attack on the USS Cole, even before we knew with any certainty that al-Qaeda was reponsible. He would have been derided as a hawk and a warmonger by many liberal and progressives, possibly even by myself, I can't honestly say.

Update (4/1): I'm reminded by this piece by Sean Aday in The Gadflyer that prior to 9/11 al-Qaeda had already attacked two US embassies as well as the USS Cole, and that Osama bin Laden had proclaimed a fatwa against us, in effect declaring war on the United States. (I know these things, but they had slipped my mind when trying to put myself in my own shoes prior to 9/11 and wondering how I would react if Clarke's plan to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been put into effect as he wanted.)

Assuming that I knew them at the time, or that they were made known to me, I think tehen that my reaction would have been similar, if less forceful, than the one I had following 9/11, which is that I would have seen them as legitimate actions against an enemy determined to harm us.